“Please,” he whispered, “don’t let her know.”
He lay quite still and listened for any sound which could indicate that the girl had seen or heard his fall and was coming to investigate, but the woodland remained quiet. The silence seemed to intensify with each passing second, and for the first time since the start of the odd little encounter Denny found himself thinking rationally. Surprise and resentment over the girl’s presence in his sanctum had diverted his thoughts from the question of why she had been there at all. He was certain she did not live in Carsewell, but even if she happened to be a visiting relative of the Reigh family, owners of most of the surrounding farmland, what had drawn her to that particular spot in the wood? Was it possible that although grown up she felt an affinity for the place? Perhaps she had been there as a child, and he was the intruder…
Denny gathered the crutches closer to him and raised himself up on them, thankful for the strength of his arms. He brushed some dried leaves off his clothing and looked in the direction of the clearing, his face warming with embarrassment as he recalled the way he had spoken to the girl. In addition to being rude he had been utterly stupid—she had been friendly, and by making the proper responses he could have extended, perhaps indefinitely, the privilege of looking at her. The sensible thing to do would be to go back and apologise, but that called for social graces he had not yet acquired. Besides, could any apology be adequate, and would she even be interested in hearing it?
He stood for a time, frowning, his body and the two duralloy supports in delicate equilibrium, then went slowly in the direction of the clearing. Doubts about what he was proposing to do caused him to move with unconscious stealth. He paused, disturbed by a sudden voyeuristic thrill, as he reached a vantage point from which he could see most of the secret place. There was the spring which in wet weather became the source of a noisy brook, there was the mossy limestone shelf which formed a natural armchair, there was the overturned stump whose roots were at exactly the right height to double as the control levers in a nuclear submarine or spaceship. And, in the centre of it all, there stood the girl, the incredibly beautiful girl.
Her arms were by her sides and her face was tilted up to the light, eyes closed as though in prayer. The vertical illumination emphasised her breasts, created a triangular shadow at the juncture of torso and thighs. Denny’s cheeks and forehead tingled hotly as, without warning, the girl’s sheer sexual allure began to flow over him. He held his breath, fascinated and at the same time wildly afraid, as the conviction stole over him that he was about to witness something secret and sacred, something he had no right to see and which was therefore totally irresistible.
The girl raised her right hand and traced a complex curve in the air. And vanished.
The disappearance was instantaneous, complete and magical. Denny, whose gaze had not wavered, gave a tremulous sigh. He waited in the same place for more than an hour, not daring to advance into the clearing, and only when the strain on his shoulders and legs became unbearable did he accept that he would not see the girl return. Not on that day, anyway, and perhaps never. He turned his back on the place and—with frequent stops for rest—made his way out of the wood and down the sloping pasture towards the buckled and weed-infested strip of the old interstate highway. His progress became slower and more painful as the minutes passed, and by the time he reached the Greenways security fence his narrow face was pale with exhaustion.
The gate opened in response to the coded signal broadcast by his identity disc. Denny passed through, grateful to be back on firm pavement, and turned left to go along the perimeter path to J Precinct. It would have been quicker to head straight through the shopping area, but his toes were now dragging noisily on the ground with each forward swing and he knew he would have attracted more attention than usual. When he turned the corner in J-12 he saw that his mother was waiting at the door of their ground-level apartment. She was dressed for going out—it was the day of her smoke-sculpture class in the community centre—and he realised she had waited until he returned home. He squared his shoulders and did his best to approach her in his normal manner, but Kay Hargate was not deceived.
“Oh, Denny!” Her eyes, sombre with concern, traced a zigzag course down his body as she moved back to let him enter the apartment. “Where have you been?”
“Just out. Nowhere special.” He tried unsuccessfully to take evasive action as she reached out and plucked something from his coat. It was a dead leaf, looking like a scrap of dark leather.
“Not Cotter’s Edge,” she said. “You haven’t been away up there again.”
“If you say I haven’t—then I haven’t. “Denny lowered himself into an armchair and lay back, yielding to his fatigue. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to float in a sea of after-images.
“Is everything all right?” his mother asked, and a troubled quality in her voice told him she had once again performed her own kind of miracle, one which was almost as awe-inspiring as being able to vanish into nothingness. “Did anything happen while you were out there?”
He briefly considered telling the truth, weighed up the consequences, then decided that life was difficult enough as it was. “Happen?” He injected a note of mild surprise into his voice. “What could have happened?”
Chapter One
Gretana ty Iltha had devised a technique for dealing with mirrors.
She knew the location of every reflective surface in her own home, in her friends’ houses and in her place of work, and before glancing at them she invariably made certain preparations. First, and most importantly, she drew in her upper lip to help disguise the fact that it was easily as full as the lower. The mouth was a principal focal point in the Mollanian culture of perfection, and for that reason its proportions had to conform very closely to those of the Lucent Ideal. Gretana also made sure that she only saw herself in three-quarter profile, a flattering angle which minimised the excessive flare of her nostrils and the projection of her ears. Finally, she always widened her eyes as far as was possible without giving herself an expression of perpetual astonishment.
With all those precautions taken she could look into a mirror and see an image which, although far from beautiful, did not necessarily inspire a pang of pity or self-revulsion. Some of her other physical flaws—being a little below ideal height and having an unacceptable shade of pigment in her hair—were more intractable, but she had come to accept that nothing could be done about them. There had been times in her fourth and fifth decades, just at the beginning of womanhood, when she had briefly considered rebelling against her active upbringing. As a member of the passive classes she would have been free to increase her height by wearing built-up shoes and to modify her whole appearance through the use of cosmetics, but—and her commonsense had always asserted itself in good time—the sacrifices would have been too great. A counterfeit beauty, a spurious conformity to the Lucent Ideal, would have been poor compensation for loss of the right to serve.